It absolutely makes no sense. If the employees have worked 40 hours and they are sending them home after 40 hours why in the world would there be any purpose/value in making them take vacation time and paying them for it? The only purpose I could possibly see in that is to make the employees use up their vacation pay so that they cannot afford to take an actual vacation...and therefore will be available to work when they would normally be on vacation.
Other than that, it seems totally ridiculous.
I'm just catching up on comments. I couldn't click the buttons to move to the next pages using my phone. Anyway, YES, this is exactly why they're doing this. There is so much work but they're not willing to give us the overtime, so they're finding little ways to get us there more often (i.e. giving up our vacation time). They also make it sound as though it's a punishment for staying late, but we can't help having to stay late either.
One part in particular I wanted to be clear on whether it was legal.
This is a medical facility. I've been a tech with this company for years and used to work hectic 60hr weeks. I'm not in charge of the time it takes to finish each task for the day. For example, yesterday, the processor in charge of the task took longer than what was expected to get as much of the material as we needed. As a result, I was forced to either stay late or leave some of the room disorganized. I contacted a supervisor and asked if I should clean the room myself or leave it for someone else to clean. I was told to find someone else and, if I couldn't, I'd have to clean it myself, which would push me over my 8hrs for the day. We're told to clock out at our 8hrs so we only work 40hr weeks, or we get written up, but we're also told to finish the tasks. I have no control over how long each task takes, each process has a set time that it takes and can't be sped up/done faster. We're not allowed overtime, but we sometimes work more than 8hrs a day. The previous solution to that was for us to leave early on a Friday (extended weekend) but now they use our paid vacation to cover the time that we are not there on Fridays, even if we have already met our 40hrs. Can they make me stay late and then penalize me (using vacation time) for staying late? We had all our overtime cut but the work load has remained the same and they expect us to be able to do something about it, but we have to follow strict protocol (it's a medical facility) and use machines, both of which can't be sped up to accommodate our new schedules.
